Ah, Traffic. You hate it in your car but love it on the Web.

Web traffic is so important to us Internet Marketers for our online businesses that it is one of my 3 Pillars of Guaranteed Success; without it you will fail and with the enough of the right you have a good chance of succeeding – you still need the other 2 Pillars though.

It is non-optional.

This is the first in a series of posts on what makes up, and how to build, the “ultimate” free traffic network. That is, a traffic network that will bring you maximum traffic and a strong Traffic Pillar.

Follow along and do what’s discussed and you’ll end up with a network that will bring you an astonishing amount of traffic.

There are two types of traffic, commonly called “free traffic” and “paid traffic”.

Of course, everything costs something so using the term “free traffic” isn’t really correct; just think of it as traffic that you get without a direct cash outlay but there may be indirect costs in time and money.

Paid traffic costs you directly and the most common forms of paid traffic are:

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC), like Google AdWords and AdSense, where you have advertisement and every time someone clicks on the ad to go to your site you pay a fee
• Cost-Per-Action (CPA) is where you have advertisements and you pay for each specified action; an action can be purchase, a new subscriber to your list, etc.
• Cost-Per-View (CPV) is where you have advertisements and you pay each time someone views your ad, whether they click or take any action at all.
• Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) is where you have advertisements and you pay a set amount for every thousand views of your ad; it is a subset of CPV.
• Advertisements are text and graphic ads with links to your Web properties, like banner ads, etc., and you pay to have to the ad shown for a specific period of time.

Free traffic doesn’t have direct costs and the most common forms of free traffic are:

• Traffic from search engines, frequently called organic traffic
• Traffic from the Web 2.0/social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, Technorati and Digg
• Traffic from content sharing sites like article directories, Squidoo and Hub Pages
• Traffic from your affiliates and even traffic that comes from e-mail sent to your lists

We’re going to look in depth at all the aspects of how to build a traffic network that floods you with targeted traffic.

The core pieces of an Ultimate Free Traffic Network are:

• Content: Providing a steady stream lots of great content to a wide variety of Web properties
• Links: Creating massive numbers of links from high value Web properties

Sounds like a lot of stuff to do and a lot work

Don’t worry, an ultimate network minimizes the amount of work you have to do to get a tsunami of traffic; it will all be explained.

Your free traffic network will be made up of 2 types of traffic:

1. Direct Traffic: this is traffic that comes directly from a link you created; usually this on one of your Web properties but it could be on a syndicated article or in an RSS feed someone is received on their Web properties
2. Indirect Traffic: this is traffic that doesn’t come directly from a link you created; using this is traffic from a search engine

A huge variety of Web properties will be used, including:

• Blogs: you will create multiple blogs that will be active, that is, it will provide new content at least once a week; the more frequent the better.
• Content Sharing Sites: you will create many articles for posting on content sharing sites like article directories (Ezine Articles, etc.), Squidoo, Hub Pages, etc.
• Social Networking Sites: you will create content for posting on social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
• Social Bookmarking Sites: you will utilize social bookmarking sites to provide links to all of the content your create and post; these are sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Propellet.
• Micro-blogging Sites: you will make sure that links to the content you create is distributed on micro-blogging sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, Jaiku and identi.ca.
• Other Sites: Many other sites will be used in your traffic network including blog directories, video sharing sites, aggregators and more

These will all be linked in a defined matrix; look at the figure for a simplistic view of what the network will look like. It is simplistic because many of the sites and connections/links are missing but was purposely kept that way for clarity.

As you can see, using a lot of different Web properties provides an amazing number of links and you see how much of this can be automated and all of it can be outsourced.

Conclusion

Everyone likes free things and free traffic is great to get.

Building an Ultimate Free Traffic Network will provide an incredible amount of targeted buyers to your sites and make a huge different in the success of your online businesses.

Using social media site, content sharing sites and other means you’ll be able to build a powerful tool to explode your business.

Surprisingly, much of it can be automated and all of it can be outsourced so that you can get these benefits on autopilot.

In the next post we’ll start digging deeper into the actual parts of the network.

Please leave a comment and tell me what you think or ask any questions you might have.

Talk soon,

David

The Shameless (Ethical) Marketer
http://www.Twitter.com/DavidHusnian
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdWords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com

.

Popularity: 33% [?]